There was one thing that Eric Church hadn’t fully thought out when he went off the Nashville grid last year to record “Mr. Misunderstood”: the “Mr. Misunderstood” tour.
By the time the record came out last November, his tour dates were already set. And there were very few shows on the books; he had planned to sit out and use most of 2016 to record a new album.
“If anybody questions the integrity of what we did, it wasn’t in any shape or form a gimmick as evidenced by how it happened,” the country singer said on Wednesday from Las Vegas, where he was hanging out poolside after snagging the Academy of Country Music Award for best video on Sunday. “I’m chomping at the bit to get out there and do it because I want to play the music, I want to play the record. But not knowing it was coming, this is an off-year for us.”
Sunday’s Country Thunder audience will be one of only a dozen or so this year that will get the live experience of “Mr. Misunderstood,” the album that was born out of a rush of inspiration and a desire to do things way outside of the Nashville box including mailing the album free of charge to 80,000 members of his Church Choir fan club before releasing the album to the public.
“This record happened so quick for me. Within a 20-day period I had written this album and within a 10-day period had recorded this album, and none of this was expected,” he said. “I thought that when it was that inspired and it happens that quick it would be a crime to sit on that record six to eight months because that’s what our schedule was. It just didn’t feel right. It felt like the way it arrived for me should be the way that it arrives for the fans.”
Church did all of this without telling a soul, including his label, EMI Records Nashville.
“We didn’t tell anybody,” the 38-year-old father of two explained. “The No. 1 mistake that a lot of people make is to tell the label this is what we’re going to do. We didn’t do that. And that was the hardest thing.”
Church and his co-conspirators knew that keeping the label out of the equation meant losing all the support systems that come with a major label release marketing, production, distribution.
Because of the timing — the fourth quarter of the year when labels were lined up to press end-of-the-year releases — there was no way he could squeeze in line. So he bought a record pressing plant in Germany to produce the vinyl and CDs. He also did the album artwork and packaging in Germany.
“We started meeting with the heads of some of the distributors saying, ‘Hey we got a Christmas album coming.’ They weren’t ordering many of them because they didn’t want a Christmas album,” he said. “And we said, ‘No you need to order more of these.’ We were trying to disguise why, but we had to eventually spill the beans about two weeks out to the Walmarts and Targets. We told them, ‘You need to buy more of these because it’s not a Christmas album’.”
Weeks before the release date in early November, Church came clean to the Universal Music Group Nashville head Mike Dungan.
“He was shocked, which I get. But what he said was ‘You have earned the right to do this.’ Anybody would tell you that’s not the way they wanted to do it. But it was the way I wanted to do it,” said Church. “I wanted to do it mainly for the fans.”
As for the record pressing plant in Germany, Church said he’s unwittingly gotten himself into the record-producing business.
“We’re going to be pressing some records,” he said with a laugh. “We’re doing some fancy business now. We’re going to be making records, pressing more of them.”
